Four Stages of Renaissance Style; Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700
Doubleday & Company, Inc. | 1955 | ISBN: N/A | English | 356 pages | PDF | 59 MB

In this discussion of the four major stages of Renaissance style—"Renaissance," Mannerism, Baroque, and Late Baroque—literary criticism is closely related to the analysis of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Professor Sypher shows how the plays of Shakespeare and Racine and the poetry of Dante, Donne, and Milton correspond in style to the changing styles in painting, architecture, and sculpture during the great period, generally known as the Renaissance, that produced Michelangelo, Botticelli, El Greco, Bernini, and Poussin. In effect, the book serves as an outline of the cultural and aesthetic history of three major centuries of artistic creation and it gives new meanings to Elizabethan, "metaphysical," "baroque," and "neo-classical" poetry and to the English and French theater of the time. The author stresses the importance of that hitherto largely neglected style called Mannerism, which appears in unexpected ways in poetry and drama as well as in the plastic and visual arts.